“When a man tells me that he is an honest man,” said the great Cardinal, “I never enter into a controversy with him as to the past. The past is past. And although I may have in my hand conclusive proofs of his guilt, I never refer to the subject. I always say, ‘My friend, you say that you are an honest man. I am delighted to hear it. We will not discuss the past. We might be unable to agree on that subject. But the future is before us. Act as an honest man from henceforth, and I shall treat you as an honest man.’”
The Cardinal’s rule may be invoked in favour of extending the same act of oblivion to Tammany and its Chief.
The account of past misrule placed on record in the Report of the Lexow Committee cannot be effaced from the page of history.
It is a useful and timely service to Tammany itself to popularise the findings of that Committee, if only to remind the men, who are now summoned to make New York the ideal city of the world, of the hole from which they were digged. A vivid remembrance of the horrible pit and the miry clay has ever been regarded as salutary for the pilgrim to the Celestial City.
Nothing is more likely to help Mr. Croker and his men to try to obey the Apostolic maxim to forget the things that are behind in order to press forward to those which are before, than the knowledge that every one can give chapter and verse in support of their belief that New York under Tammany rule in the past really deserved the title of “Satan’s Invisible World.”
On that point there is no longer any room for difference of opinion. To question it is to justify disbelief in the honesty of the sceptic or the sincerity of his professions as a Reformer. But we may well be content to let the dead past bury its dead if, rising upon the wreck and ruin of these evil days, Tammany should now attain to nobler things.
There is at least one great historical precedent justifying a hope that this may be so.
When Madcap Hal succeeded to the English throne, there was the same jubilant exultation among Falstaff, Bardolph and all the roystering crew when Pistol rushed in helter-skelter, crying:—
And tidings do I bring, and lucky joys,
And golden times, and happy news of price.
But the story of their disappointment is one of the most familiar and dramatic scenes in the history of the English-speaking race. The question now is whether Mr. Croker will dare to address his old companions of misrule in the words of Henry the Fifth:—